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Simon Michael

Simon is an independent consultant and free software hacker based in Los Angeles. He was been inspired by the Free Software movement in the nineties, when he noticed that their products were superior and their principles effective. He is a long-time computer hobbyist and professional software developer and sysadmin with 30 years of computing experience. His first computer - something he could program during boring school classes - was a TI-58A programmable calculator. His first *real* computer was a Sinclair ZX-80 with 1K of RAM. Then on to Commodore PET, Vic-20, C-64, Amiga, before crashing back to the world of MS-DOS. His character was marked by long years with flaky self-assembled PC clones that never worked right, until the gradual redemption by laptop, and eventual ascent to macbook. Simon is the leader of the hledger project, which is an expanding set of accounting tools, written in Haskell, inspired by Ledger and begun in 2007. Prior to starting hledger, he was a happy Ledger user, and created Ledger's website. Before that, Simon led the Zwiki project, a popular wiki engine based on the Zope platform. He has also been a keen Squeaker, and created the (now rather quiet) http://planet.squeak.org aggregators. In recent years, he has been investing heavily in Haskell. He operates hackagebot, which announces new releases in the #haskell IRC channel. He is also a contributor to the darcs project, and operates http://hub.darcs.net , a github-like site for darcs users.